The invention relates to a method for automatic character recognition, object classification, or the like. An opto-electrical transducer is employed for sampling a respective character column-wise, said transducer comprising a series of photo sensors and its output signals being deposited in a following image signal memory as an image pattern matrix consisting of black-white values and corresponding to the sampled character.
Various classification methods have become known in the field of character recognition. One of these known methods is the so-called matrix analysis method in which the sampled character is intermediately stored in a memory as a mosaic image in the form of a matrix consisting of black and white image points for further evaluation. This occurs in such manner that specific image points and image point combinations which characterize the shapes of the various characters and their mutual deviations as best possible are selected from said matrix.